After researching Hany Abu-Assad's Omar (2013), a
compelling drama set in the occupied West Bank, I discovered that the director
had made a previous film that received two Academy Award nominations but was
probably less known in the UK than Omar.
This previous movie is Paradise Now released in 2005 but
not in the UK until a year later. It's a film whose subject matter would not
please everybody, that's for sure; but it's a movie that goes a long way in
explaining the motivation behind seemingly ordinary people who are prepared to
become suicide bombers because of what they believe in. In this case the attack
is to take place against an aggressor that has invaded a country to which they
have no legitimate right.
The movie follows two Palestinian childhood friends Said (Kai Nashif)
and Khaled (Ali Suliman) who live in Nablus and are recruited by the local
resistance group to carry out a suicide attack in Tel Aviv, Israel's second
most populated city after Jerusalem. There was problem’s making the film on
location to which the director is reputed to have commented that if he could go
back in time he would not have made the film! This followed a land mine
exploding near the set, a missile attack by Israeli gunships on a car again
very close to where the filming was taking place, prompting some crewmembers to
abandon the project. If that was not bad enough the film’s location manager was
kidnapped during the shot, eventually released following intervention from
Yasser Arafat’s office. Who said filmmaking was easy?
In Hany Abu-Assad's Golden Globe acceptance speech he said that he hoped
that the award would be "a recognition that the Palestinians deserve their
liberty and equality unconditionally" and as I opined in my blog on the recent
global warming documentary Greedy Lying
Bastards, movies are becoming essential in providing
information to make people think and formulate their own views. Let's hope film
directors of the calibre of Abu-Assad carry on the good work and are not side
tracked by the promise of fame and glory.
More brothers in arms than The Blues Brothers. |
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